Chapter 23 | Case closes with a final twist

Editor's note: To Catch a Killer is the true story of killer Andy James Ortiz, his young victims, and the Fort Worth police and Tarrant County prosecutors who brought him to justice.

The story so far

Fort Worth Detective Curt Brannan found a key witness in the killing of Armida Garcia, 15, allowing prosecutors to accept charges in that case, as they had in the murder of Brenda Salazar, 20.

CHAPTER 23

For veteran criminal defense lawyers Tim Moore and Robert Ford, the chore was grim but perfunctory. The odds of finding anything truly useful among the evidence collected in young Armida Garcia's case were remote. Still, the court-appointed lawyers for Andy Ortiz needed to take a look, which they did about a month before the first of two murder trials in October 2001.

In a brightly lit evidence room of the Fort Worth Police Department, the attorneys donned rubber gloves to examine the young victim's clothing laid out for them on a table, next to the shoelaces allegedly used by their client to strangle her.

"It was kind of awful," Ford remembered recently. "In a murder case or capital murder case, that sort of stuff is death personified."

Then they came to a large cardboard box. One of the lawyers opened the top and reached inside. What he found was chilling: dozens of snapshots of Hispanic girls and young women in suggestive poses and various states of undress; more than 100 scraps of paper, each with the names and telephone numbers of one or more females. The contents, the lawyers learned, were found by police in their client's bedroom.

"It was just normal crime scene stuff -- then, boom, this box," Ford remembered. "We just looked at each other. It took our breath away. ... It was like a collection."

For the lawyers, the implications of their discovery were immediately clear. Since their appointment to defend Ortiz months before, Ford and Moore had pondered their strategy in the two capital murder trials he faced, looking for ways to plant reasonable doubt in jurors' minds. Putting the defendant on the stand was one possibility, because Moore and Ford found Ortiz to be reasonably articulate and soft-spoken, and he might have made a convincing witness.

But now there was no way that would happen. Under the rules of evidence, if Ortiz testified, prosecutors would be allowed to counter and attack his credibility by introducing the contents of that box. Jurors would be able to thumb through the pieces of paper and look over the photographs. So no, Ortiz would not take the stand. Nor would his lawyers call any witnesses who might open the evidentiary door and allow the photos and slips of paper to be brought into court.

That was why, in Ortiz's back-to-back trials in October 2001, the defense lawyers were mostly silent.

"We sat on our hands," Ford said.

Overwhelming evidence

On Tuesday morning, Oct. 2, 2001, a dark-haired, youthful-looking judge took the bench and smiled at about 60 prospective jurors.

"Welcome to the friendly confines of the 396th District Court," the judge said. "I'm George Gallagher."

The greeting was typical of Gallagher, a genial man known to joke with prosecution and defense lawyers during the tensest and most gruesome cases. But he also had a highly respected legal mind, and in this case, he made a ruling that would almost ensure that Andy Ortiz would never see the streets again. Gallagher decided that prosecutors in Ortiz's trial for the rape and strangulation of Armida Garcia could also introduce evidence linking the defendant to Brenda Salazar's killing. Even without the contents of the box, the weight of the evidence against Ortiz in both grisly slayings would be overwhelming. Prosecutors had chosen to have separate trials so that sentences could be consecutive rather than served at the same time.

Ortiz remained composed during the first trial, showing up for the first day in a red-and-white plaid shirt and black Ralph Lauren jeans. He often turned and winked at his parents and several friends and relatives. He embraced his mother during recesses. Occasionally, the defendant made notes on a legal pad or whispered to his attorneys, but otherwise he showed little emotion.

"He was always calm. He was very cooperative," Ford remembered. "But like every person when they really get into a trial situation, he was somewhat taken aback, stunned by the evidence. They might daydream or imagine how it's going to be. But once the evidence starts rolling in and it's the state who controls the evidence, it's nothing like they dreamed it would be."

The Garcia and Salazar families sat together on the other side of the courtroom, weeping and holding hands while their shared nightmare of 1997 was replayed in Gallagher's court.

Prosecutors Alan Levy and Robert Foran called a series of witnesses whom Ortiz's lawyers could not discredit. Roberto Jordan, a cousin of Armida's, described seeing Ortiz on the front porch with the girl the night she died. A neighbor, Ann, spoke of seeing Ortiz flee down the alley behind Armida's house not long before sirens punctured the night. Fernando Garcia, Armida's younger brother, described coming home to find his sister lying in his parents' bedroom, his own shoelaces tied tightly around her neck. The mouths of several jurors fell open as a recording of Fernando's desperate 911 call was played in court.

But the key witness against Ortiz, in both killings, was a man who had not known either victim. His name was William Watson, and he was one of the nation's leading forensic scientists. He had once worked in the Fort Worth Police Department crime lab and later analyzed the DNA evidence in both cases while working at a private lab in Dallas. From the witness stand, Watson gave jurors a primer on genetics, an explanation that contained terms such as "polymerase chain reaction." Then Watson delivered the bottom line.

There could be no doubt that it was Ortiz's DNA beneath Armida's fingernails, Watson said. The odds that the genetic material belonged to anyone else were 1 in 402 million. In Salazar's case, the scientific certainty was even greater. The odds that the semen in Salazar's mouth belonged to anyone but the defendant were more than 1 in 1 trillion, Watson said.

"Now ladies and gentlemen, we have a killer in this courtroom," Levy roared in his closing argument at the first trial. "Don't let him walk away. He is a dangerous man. ... The scientific evidence, the physical evidence, the eyewitness testimony, all is consistent, all points to this man and no other person on this planet."

On Monday, Oct. 8, jurors deliberated for only an hour before finding Ortiz guilty of capital murder in Armida's death. Ten days later, after another brief trial, a second jury quickly convicted him of killing Brenda. But in one of the story's most controversial twists, the defendant would never face the ultimate punishment for his crimes.

Months before, Levy had decided to waive the death penalty. Ortiz was sentenced instead to two life terms in prison, stacked one on top of the other. He would be more than 100 years old before he was eligible for parole. Years later, some still wondered: Why was his life spared?

Wrath and conscience

Armida's mother, Graciela Garcia, was among them.

"I know of other cases where a person -- simply for shooting another person to death -- they get the death penalty," she said in a recent interview. "He did three [killings] -- and you never know, he might have done more -- but he didn't get the death penalty. Those of us that lost our kids, there's not going to be a remedy because nothing can bring our kids back. What I'm saying is, the law isn't fair."

Detective Curt Brannan did not disagree. A devout Christian, he had wrestled with the morality of capital punishment for years, eventually coming to believe that it was part of a code of justice described by the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans: Ministers of God on earth would "execute wrath upon him that doeth evil ... not only for wrath, but for conscience' sake."

"That's my commission," Brannan said.

If Ortiz had not done evil, Brannan had long wondered, who had? And he could not help comparing Ortiz with a killer whom Brannan had helped put on Death Row, a young man named Jeffrey Dillingham. In March 1992, Dillingham and a friend named Brian Salter slipped into a brick mansion in west Fort Worth, found socialite Caren Koslow and her husband, Jack, in their bedroom, bludgeoned the couple and slashed their throats.

Jack Koslow survived, but his wife did not. Dillingham had quickly confessed after his arrest, describing for Brannan the motive for the crime: Kristi Koslow, Jack Koslow's daughter, had persuaded Salter and Dillingham to kill her father and stepmother for the daughter's $1 million inheritance.

Salter eventually pleaded guilty in exchange for a life sentence. In a capital murder trial, jurors spared Kristi Koslow, and she was also sentenced to life. Dillingham, who rejected the state's plea-bargain offer of a life sentence, was found guilty and ordered to die. Eight years after the crime, on Nov. 1, 2000, the former honor student at Brewer High School in White Settlement was strapped to a gurney in Huntsville. He smiled at his family, apologized to his victims and was given a lethal injection.

To Brannan, Dillingham was one of the greatest mysteries of the Koslow case and one of the saddest ironies of his career. If Dillingham needed to die, Brannan thought, Ortiz did, too. Dillingham "had never been in trouble, was a goofy high school kid running around on dates and wanting a nice car," Brannan said. "... I'm not [minimizing] his offense, but this was, like, a one-time thing. Whereas Ortiz was on a totally different plane. Yet Dillingham is already dead, and Ortiz is smoking and joking down there in the joint. Where is the justice in that?

"I worked both cases," Brannan continued. "I stood in the blood of both of the victims. I've dealt with the families of both of the victims. That seems less just than what society would expect. I have a hard time with a lot of it."

'He's as good as dead'

No one would accuse Levy of being squeamish about capital punishment or anything else. Since he joined the district attorney's office in 1985, a small legend had grown up around the tall, dark-haired prosecutor who studied Shakespeare, climbed mountains, wandered around the office most days in his stocking feet and could not resist forking over $5 to any panhandler who asked. He also eventually lost count of the men and women he had sent to Death Row.

Levy's reputation, says Fort Worth defense attorney Jack Strickland, "extends around the state and maybe beyond. He's a very, very effective trial lawyer, is a prolific author of legal papers and gives a great lecture on almost any topic. Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, Alan has an incredibly quick mind and dry wit that lawyers are not necessarily well-known for. "The other fact is that Alan does not suffer fools gladly, and he's pretty blunt in his assessments," said Strickland, who defended Dillingham. (Strickland, a frequent courtroom opponent, also became a close friend of Levy's.)

That famous candor was evident in recent interviews when Levy discussed the Ortiz case. The prosecutor termed the Ortiz criminal investigation "a dog's breakfast [defined as a mess or muddle] of police work, to borrow a phrase from the British." Levy referred to questions about how DNA evidence and fingerprints were handled in the case. He also criticized detectives for failing to link the Salazar and Garcia cases in 1997.

"Why was it that they didn't check [Ortiz] in the Salazar case when they had two young females who had been strangled with a ligature, which the police say had similar knots, 90 days apart?" Levy asked. "They never took a known suspect's print and compared them against the identifiable print [from Brenda Salazar's car] that they had. We never received any explanation for that."

When told of Levy's statements, Sgt. Paul Kratz, the homicide unit supervisor in 1997, said he did not want to comment. "I don't want to get into a mudslinging contest with them," Kratz said. "I think anytime you look back on something after you know the answer, it makes it a lot easier to say, 'How come this wasn't done?'"

Still, Levy said those questions contributed to his decision to waive the death penalty. Jurors hold the state to a higher standard in death penalty cases and are less likely to tolerate complications, screw-ups and ambiguity.

"As a practical matter, you don't want to [seek the death penalty in] a case that has any kind of issues in it to test the jury," Levy said. "Once they start having things to worry about, then you start having problems with the case."

Also, in 2001, the DNA testing conducted by Watson was a relatively new technology that might have made jurors in a death penalty case skittish, Levy said. With stacked life sentences, the prosecutor said, he knew he could get Ortiz off the streets forever.

"We wanted him gone," Levy said. "We wanted the certainty of these convictions. We wanted them one after another and to get him out of the courthouse and down the road. ... He's not going to be a martyr to an unjust justice system directed at poor Hispanics. Nobody from Sweden is going to be writing any letters about how he was mistreated by the Texas criminal justice system. He's gone. He's as good as dead."

In recent interviews, Levy also acknowledged that there is room for disagreement on the question of Ortiz's punishment. "Certainly, we didn't fail to seek [the death penalty against Ortiz] because he didn't deserve it," Levy said. "He certainly deserved it. I agree with that analysis."

Today, given that television dramas have popularized forensic science and that jurors not only are comfortable with but also expect DNA evidence, Levy said he might have made a different decision.

"If I had to do it all over again, knowing what I know now about the science, I might have taken it as a death penalty case," he said. "I don't think, knowing what I knew then, the state of science at that point, that the decision was wrong."

Tomorrow: In the killer's own words.

TIMELINE

Early 1995: Andy Ortiz first meets 13-year-old Armida Garcia and gets her number.

Summer 1996: Nineteen-year-old Brenda Salazar moves to North Texas to pursue a job in the airline industry.

May 26, 1997: Salazar's roommate discovers Salazar's body in their apartment.

Aug. 3, 1997: Garcia is strangled in her parents' bedroom.

Aug. 8, 1997: Ortiz is arrested in the Garcia killing; Detective Joe Thornton tries to get Ortiz to confess but is unsuccessful.

Fall 1997: The Salazar murder case grows cold.

Late 1997: Ortiz is jailed on parole violations; he begins corresponding with a 15-year-old named Anna.

January 1998: Thornton gets a tip about Ortiz fleeing from Garcia's home the night of the killing, but he can't find the witness.

July 1999: Ortiz moves in with Anna's family.

Jan. 29, 2000: Ortiz marries Anna.

March 8, 2000: Ortiz is kicked out of the house by his mother-in-law.

July 18, 2000: Krystal Minjarez, 13, sneaks out and is picked up by a young man named "Jaime." She calls a friend later to say she is at his home.

July 21, 2000: Minjarez's body is found at Marine Creek Lake.

July 25, 2000: After finding Ortiz's address listed in Minjarez's address book, Detective Curt Brannan gets a search warrant.

July 26, 2000: Police find photos of scantily clad young women and phone numbers of hundreds of girls in Ortiz's room; Ortiz implicates a friend, Michael Olguin, in the Minjarez killing.

Aug. 11, 2000: Brannan finds out that a fingerprint on Salazar's car belongs to Ortiz; the print apparently was not run in 1997.

Aug. 13, 2000: Olguin wears a wire and tries to get Ortiz to confess; he is unsuccessful.

Aug. 15, 2000: Brannan finds out that DNA evidence from Salazar's body matches Ortiz; Ortiz is arrested.

Aug. 17, 2000: Prosecutors pursue a capital murder case against Ortiz in Salazar's death.

Aug. 22 and 24, 2000: Two victims tell Brannan they were raped by Ortiz; aggravated-rape charges are added.

Aug. 25, 2000: Brannan meets with Garcia's parents; he finds out who saw Ortiz leaving Garcia's house after the killing.

Aug. 28, 2000: Brannan meets with the witness; she identifies Ortiz. Prosecutors add a capital murder charge in the Garcia killing.